Uncovering the Beautiful Mystery of Vivian Maier

I adore a good mystery. I relish a jigsaw-like story where I only know some of the fragments and have to piece them together carefully, squinting to try and envision the complete image.

When I found out about the artist Henry Darger, for example, I was fascinated – this man lived what many would have considered a sad, lonely life, but behind closed doors he created what posthumously became some of the most celebrated examples of outsider art.

The newly emerged story of Vivian Maier, then, is just the sort of mystery that gets my nose twitching.

What we know about Vivian is this: she was a nanny; she spoke with a French accent; she lived in Chicago for part of her life; she was well-read, interested in art and culture…and she took some of the most beautiful street photographs you will ever see.

Copyright Maloof Collection

And we know this, too – that her talent was secret until after her death; and that there are still thousands more of her photographs yet to be developed.

We can thank Chicagoan John Maloof for bringing Vivian’s work to us. Back in 2007, he was a 26-year-old real estate agent and co-authoring a book about his local neighbourhood. He went to an auction looking for material for this book and bought a box, filled with negatives, from a repossessed storage locker , thinking there may be some photos of the local suburbs inside.

What he found inside the box (which cost him $400) were 30,000 negatives, all of street scenes from Chicago and beyond. These photographs stunned him, so much so that he contacted the buyers of the other boxes and bought them all from them. That made him the owner of around 100,000 negatives and boxes of undeveloped film – all taken by a person whose name he didn’t even know.

One day, John found the name ‘Vivian Maier’ scribbled on a photo-lab envelope stuffed inside one of the boxes. Mystery (almost) solved. He wanted to meet Vivian, to tell her how beautiful he found her work, to ask her what inspired her and if she could teach him how to take such enchanting photographs. He says on his blog:

“It took me days to look through all of her work. It inspired me to pick up photography myself. Little by little, as I progressed as a photographer, I would revisit Vivian’s negatives and I would “see” more in her work. I bought her same camera and took to the same streets soon to realize how difficult it was to make images of her caliber. I discovered the eye she had for photography through my own practice. Needless to say, I am attached to her work.”

But John and Vivian never met.

Vivian had slipped on ice just months before the boxes of her work were sold, and after a spell in a nursing home, she died, at the age of 83.

Through his own research, John was able to wipe the dust off his own mental picture of Vivian and her life. He discovered she was born in New York in 1926, and lived in France and New York growing up. By her mid-20s, she was living permanently in the US, where she worked for a number of different families as a nanny.

The families who she worked with told John that Vivian was a feminist, an independent woman with an appetite for travel and a love for movies. She entertained the children by bringing them on ‘adventures’. She wore men’s clothes and was seen by some as a bit of an eccentric. In a move that was unusual at the time, she journeyed alone in 1959, and captured her travels on her trusty Rolleiflex camera, in Egypt, Bangkok, Thailand, Taiwan, Vietnam, France, Italy, Indonesia and beyond.

She took hundreds of thousands of photographs, but she never showed them to anyone.

She collected binders and filled them with newspaper clippings; she amassed a large collection of books on photography.

Vivian has been described as aloof, and perhaps it was this aloofness that enabled her to capture the images she did. I picture her slinking into a crowd and remaining unseen, allowing her to snap moments in time that the average person may miss in a blink.

Her photographs, like her life, leave you with questions.

Who are these people? Did they know they were being photographed? Where were they going? What were they thinking?

Copyright Maloof Collection

Copyright Maloof Collection

Copyright Maloof Collection

I love that Vivian photographed all elements of society, from fur-wearing rich dames to scruffy, dirty-clothes-wearing children. The faces of these people are black, white, old, young, lined, untroubled, calm, agitated.

Copyright Maloof Collection

Copyright Maloof Collection

Copyright Maloof Collection

Copyright Maloof Collection

The best photography hits you in your heart. You don’t need to be an expert in composition to know that these photographs that the mysterious Vivian Maier took are simply stunning. Through her, we are given a glimpse into American life fifty years ago. Vivian makes this time come alive, makes you gasp at the beauty that can be found on a downtown street.

Copyright Maloof Collection

It’s no surprise to hear that John Maloof has become totally dedicated to preserving the work of Vivian Maier. He and Anthony Rydzon spend four to five days a week scanning her negatives on expensive equipment that John bought himself – but it will take years for their work to be complete.

The two men are currently working on a book and film about Vivian, and have set up a Kickstarter fund to raise money. Thanks to them, Vivian’s work has an audience that she may never have dreamed of.

Of course, the fact that Vivian was so private begs the question: would she want her work made public like this?

This excerpt from a tape recording made by Vivian provides, for me, the answer:

“Well I suppose nothing is meant to last forever; we have to make room for other people, it’s a wheel. You get on and you get off at the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to get to the end and so on.”

Beauty is truth, truth beauty. But perhaps mystery is the most beautiful of all.

Fantastic post. I read a bit about her in the Sunday Times magazine a few weeks ago. Such amazing images. The ones of the girl in the white dress walking towards the car and the drunk lad being held up are just awesome.

Right. There goes the rest of my afternoon. :scrolls voraciously through photos:

Thanks for this piece, Aoife. I grew up in Chicago and love street scenes, but these photos are something else entirely: gorgeous composition and full of crazy narratives. Thank you for introducing me to her work. And my hat goes off to John and Anthony for making the archive such a dedicated quest.

Oh, and the Darger mention at the start of the article had me thinking there was going to be some bizarre link to Vivian Maier and the Vivian Girls, but I guess that was just my imagination getting carried away.

Thanks everyone for the lovely comments, so glad that it struck you all in the heart as it did me!

When I saw the video above (I think @glinner on twitter linked to it) I was left speechless. It’s incredible what work goes unnoticed; I imagine that Vivian knew she was a good photographer (she really seemed to study her craft) but I suspect she didn’t know exactly how good.

Therese – I love the ‘Vivian’ link between the two as well! I just had to mention him even though there is no connection between them. Although they operated in two different fields and had different stories, but they both left fascinating legacies behind them. I lived in Chicago for a summer (your hometown is an amazing place!!) so like you I was doubly excited to see photos of the city.

Beautiful & inspiring.
Just what I needed to see after this otherwise completely forgettable day.

I’m glad you asked the question at the end about Vivian’s own intentions. I’m not sure if that quote really answered the question if she would’ve liked her work shown around the world today? It ties in nicely with something I’ve thought about for a long time – what does happen to your (shoeboxes full of) photographs after you die?

For me, that quote means that John Maloof is carrying on her work, so to speak…he has even taken similar shots to hers (they’re on his flickr page).
We’ll never know what she might have thought and she definitely was a private woman who didn’t plan an exhibition of her own.
But she was so passionate about photography, I don’t think she would begrudge John for bringing her work to a bigger audience…perhaps the hardest thing for her would be people talking about her character rather than her photographs.

Good question about the photographs! I bought some old photos (including a wedding photo) at a car boot sale recently, it is a privilege getting a glimpse into someone else’s life.

Really lovely post Aoife. I was vaguely aware of this story but you have pulled it together beautifully and used such stunning images to illustrate it. Scary to think that they were almost lost forever and uplifting that they found their way into such safe and respectful hands.

I love that the internet is making it so much easier to disseminate information about lesser known figures, and to spread images by them. A friend linked me to these ( http://chateauthombeau.blogspot.com/2011/01/on-street.html ) images by a photographer called Harry Callahan just yesterday. I’d never heard of him, but I love the tight closeups..

What a lovely article – I was linked to it on Twitter and had kept it to read at a later date, i’m so glad I read it now.

I love these mystery filled type stories aswell and, as with all street photos, guessing who the people are, where they’re going, what they’re thinking, is half the fun. It just adds to it that there’s a mystery surrounding the photographer aswell. What an inspiring story – I always love to hear about empowered women from a different era – wearing men’s clothes, travelling alone…we take so much for granted.

Thanks to Suzanne for posting the link to the story about the story — how the ‘origin’ of this story isn’t as clean-cut as many articles make it sound.

This Chicago Magazine article has that same ‘Maloof found everything himself’ narrative, but more significantly has more details on Maier’s life, including some very sweet details about how the Gensburgs looked after her in her later years, and at the end. I love the idea that even such a solitary person would have “adopted” sons who loved her & cared for her at the end.

[…] so gender issues really bind the posts most closely. I came across a really intriguing post by Aoife Barry on a photographer called Vivian Maier. Her amazing photographs documenting Chicago’s streets, […]